MUMBAI: The unprecedented boom in the Indian media and entertainment (M&E) has been attracting eyeballs galore. At the FICCI FRAMES convention, Pricewaterhouse Cooper (PwC) managing director Deepak Kapoor, Yash Chopra, ENIl managing director A P Parigi, INX Group chairman Peter Mukerjea and PwC’s Smita Jha addressed the factors that will help in giving the industry that extra fillip.
PwC’s Kapoor addressed the boom in the M&E sector and presented this year’s FICCI – PwC report, the theme of which is sustaining growth. “While there has been growth in all sectors of M&E, television has witnessed a growth of 18 per cent, radio – 24 per cent, print – 16 per cent and filmed entertainment – 14 per cent,” he said.
Commenting on the boom in the TV sector Mukerjea pointed out that despite an increase in the number of channels, the industry needs to know that only 50 per cent homes in India have television sets and only half of these are colour TV sets. “The government should give incentives to the distribution industry in television to move from analog to digital, which in turn will boost the productions and delivery of content,” said Mukerjea.
Parigi added that there was a need to chalk out policies in the M&E sector for the next 15-20 years. He further stressed upon the need for educational institutions to sustain the growth in M&E. "Just like IIT and IIM backed companies like Wipro and Infosys, the M&E industry also needs similar such institutes. M&E curriculum should be made mainstream in universities," said Parigi. He further stressed upon the need for more Indian financial institutions as opposed to foreign investments to boost the radio sector.
PwC’s Jha pointed out that despite the boom in M&E, the penetration of media in India is low compared to other countries worldwide. Jha said, “The government should take an initiative to increase media accessibility by increasing literacy rate and broadband penetration, which will benefit the print and internet media respectively.”
The key themes dominating the M&E sector over the next five years will be migration to digital formats, consolidation and integration, intellectual property management, continued content fragmentation and growth in media consumption.
What may be termed as a truly distinctive feature is that, this year onwards sports too has been included in the annual PwC FICCI FRAMES report due to the boom in cricket with private leagues like IPL and ICL coming into play.
